If you don’t reblog this, I have no faith in your humanity whatsoever.
He’s off on an assignment sanctioned by his government to invade a country where people of the same age of his son will be shot to death in night raids and massacres will go unreported but pictures like this one will keep popping up on TV, social media dashboards and timelines to garner misplaced sympathy with a machine that uses people to kill people.
I am always amazed by how easily people fall for this kind of bullshit. More like if you don’t reblog this, I have faith in your ability to see through media propaganda that glorifies invasions and occupations by showing an Empire’s soldiers with their children but never showing the people they kill in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond.
I personally know/knew a great many veterans, from Vietnam to the current wars being conducted and even some WWII veterans. Most of them hate(d) war and they are really good people that were thrown into a shitty situation, used, and thrown out like the garbage because our government doesn’t give a shit about them. Our veterans hospitals don’t provide adequate care for these men and women, from reusing dirty needles and equipment that should be thrown out and not giving proper treatment and diagnoses. They are also given no means of making a living when they come back to civilian life and often become homeless. A great many of them are actually anti-war activists now. Many are crippled for life, others end up killing themselves because it’s too much for them to bear (the numbers are staggering, actually). There’s also all the rape victims, men and women alike that are never served justice because the higher ups are trying to sweep it all under the rug and don’t give a shit about that either.
A great many of them volunteer because they have no where else to go, no way of making money so they can have three meals a day and have a roof over their heads and do all the things that we all love to do in our free time as well. A lot of them, as you see in the picture above, have families to take care of and when there aren’t adequate paying jobs out there the military is a much better option because their spouse and children will have healthcare and housing and food.
My brother’s father lived through Vietnam, surviving through being exposed to agent orange (he can’t regulate his body temperature now among many other things. He could be sitting next to a piping hot woodstove in winter and still be freezing and shivering) and frontline jungle fighting and watching his best friend get blown to smithereens as he sat down on a land mine right next to him. I’m talking there was nothing left of him. To this day this guy is a biggest pacifist you’ll ever meet, he won’t even kill animals. In fact now he makes sure all the animals that live on his land are safe from hunters and trappers.
Another friend of his was a helicopter gunner that to this day is haunted by the memory of bashing a guy in the face with a rifle to keep him out the helicopter because there wasn’t enough room and too much weight on it already as they were rescuing a group of soldiers who were completely surrounded.
When they returned from the war they were spat upon and harassed right as they left the airport because they were forced to go and fight and go through all these horrible things and do shit that they didn’t want to do. People didn’t want to hire them because of the stigma attached to them from people like you.
I won’t divulge more stories from people I know and knew and books I’ve read because then this will get long-winded, and I already feel like people will ignore or piss on this because they are ignorant and content with lapping up whatever they are spoon-fed.
Stop paying attention to propaganda that you read on tumblr and start critically thinking for yourself. Veterans are victims of it all too and they’re people just like me and you, and everyone else on the planet and not the mindless automatons that assholes make them out to be.
